OER are Open Educational Resources that are
licensed for reuse, repurposing and remixing.
At Oxford, open resources must be used not-
for-profit and for learning, teaching or research
purposes, and our OER licences reflect this.

OpenSpires is the umbrella project for
delivering, promoting and supporting the
release of OER from Oxford University. Within
OpenSpires there are many diverse projects
as well as individual pockets of innovation.

The blog uses 3 innovative new tools, Dynamic collections:
A dynamic tool for building community-curated
directories of OER material. Subject specialists
can easily create new collections and these are
automatically populated with online resources
of different media types., Learning path creator:
A new tool allowing registered users to bookmark in their
browser any online resource and deposit this within the
blog framework. This bookmark approach quickly builds
structured lists or learning pathways around a thematic
topic., Tools and support resources:
Tools developed to improve the OER
experience within the blogging environment
including support for cataloguing, ingest of
OER, image search and export to stand-alone
documents. These tools have been openly
released that other subject areas can employ
them.

This website is being developed by a range of
experts in the field of First World War Studies.
They provide articles, resources, and academic
guidance to the project team in their
development of the site. A team of student
ambassadors have worked to curate and add
existing resources on the World Wide Web.

The project is a collaboration between teams at
the University of Oxford responsible for the First
World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Great
War Archive (funded under the JISC Content
and Digitisation Programme), and the Oxford
Open Spires, Triton, and Great Writers projects.

JISC Funding Phase One: Release
- Start Up Focus (2009/10), Within the year of JISC funding, 2010,
OpenSpires was successful in releasing 300
audio and video items, involving 140 academics
in open content release. At the end of this year
the university designed a licence agreement
that made releasing OER with a CC licence very
simple, and thus a very sustainable process., In the second year, there was a significant
increase in the number of items and
contributors. This increase there was evidence
that the process is sustainable, that openness
is embedded at Oxford and that there is use
and re-use of OER. This was achieved without
specific project funding and staffing, as in the
second year the funding emphasis had shifted
to another aspect of openness.

JISC Funding Phase Two: Reuse
- Two Main Projects (2010/11), The Triton Project, designed to support the
reuse of OER by specific subject community, This was the Politics in Spires blog, which uses
students as primary OER content generators.
The blog was a model of reuse. Much of it is
reusable – plugins, code, content, and the
model of content delivery – and it also collects
subject-specific OER from elsewhere and
brings this to the surface for a subject
community to reuse. The site has been built to
be entirely re-purposable, as a ‘site in a box’
concept., The Ripple Project, an initiative to support
partner institutions in releasing their own OER., Ripple provided the opportunity for two partner
institutions, Oxford Brookes University and
Harper Adams University, to engage in various
aspects of OER release, empowering
participants to develop their own vision. Five
workshops were delivered covering key aspects
of OER release. As a result 15 collections were
released as OER by our partner institutions., Unique reusable OER training resources from
workshops released for the benefit of the wider
community. There are 18 videos from key
speakers; 19 audio recordings of
presentations; 14 other workshop documents
to support OER training; Five workshop reports
on the project blog and Five workshop
evaluation reports., Four instructional videos released in an OER
Toolkit for reuse and remixing.

JISC Funding Phase Three:
Discovery:
- Releasing Collections of New
and Existing OER (2011/12), Great Writers Inspire: A project that gathers
literature resources into a new portal. These
resources are collected by themes and writers
and are primarily for undergraduates but have
some schools level relevance. Collections
include audio/video material, ebooks (Oxford text
archives), images, external materials of value,
and an essay to amalgamate the material. The
project also has thousands of ebooks in its
library., Student ambassadors were employed to create
and source OERs and to embed the blog within
the department. This was enormously
successful at addressing the potential content
generation problem., Great Writers Inspire provides varied resources
for re-use that have had their licences
thoroughly checked and displayed. There is
flexibility and inspirational capacity in these
OER collections but the project but is not
designed to provide ready-made lesson plans., It is also a model that could be generalised to
another department or discipline., Spindle: Automatic Speech Recognition
software to automatically obtain keywords from
podcasts in order to increase discoverability
through organic search., WW1 Centenary Project: This resource is
funded by the JISC World War One (WW1)
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Programme as part of the World War One
Commemoration Programme. The project
will surface the highest quality OER in the
field of World War One studies and related
disciplines. The project will innovatively
revisualise a series of OER to showcase
the full potential of using open material to
seed academic debate.

Unique channel of dissemination: Often it would not
otherwise be possible for an academic to reach this kind
of audience.

Profile-raising: OER add considerable value to the
academic, their department and their research by making
them more discoverable and proving their engagement
with the public.

Impact and outreach: Passing on subject knowledge and
teaching expertise is a driver for cultural change. This
advances institutional recognition and reputation and
enhances the international public service reputation of the
contributor.

Will using OER in my course
teaching damage my academic
integrity (especially in light of the
recent rise in University Fees), Intergrating OER materials into teaching
practice/voice helps enhance the learning
experience but does not replace the work of
preparing lectures and classes.
Engagement with open learning is also in line
with new government directives for Higher
Education.

Will students still come to my lectures if
they're available online?, Evidence in Oxford so far has shown that
students still attend lectures whether or not
they are available online. Recorded lectures
also have a listen-again function that is
useful for revision of difficult topics.

Will the university still pay me for lectures that
they now have available in recordings?, In Oxford there are too many lectures for a
person to attend all of them in one year.
Furthermore there is often not enough space
for everyone to attend: students may be
turned away from oversubscribed lectures
and the lecture may have to be repeated
twice in a term.